Are your employees truly engaged in their work?
With only 30% of US workers engaged, it makes great business sense to proactively find ways to better engage your employees. Hundreds of studies have shown that employee engagement directly drives increased corporate profitability and improved employee retention. And the inverse is also true. According to the Corporate Leadership Council, employees with lower engagement levels are four times more likely to leave their jobs than those who are highly engaged.
Simple fact: disengaged employees are unsatisfied employees. Gallup polls have shown that companies with a large number of dissatisfied workers have greater absenteeism and lower productivity, as well as a 51% higher employee turnover rate.
So, what steps can you take to increase employee engagement?
Develop plans to retain your best employees and give them what they need to succeed and feel valued. Focus on the REAL DRIVERS of employee engagement and employee satisfaction: communication, performance clarity and feedback, organizational culture, rewards and recognition, relationships with managers and peers, career development opportunities and knowledge of the organization’s goals and vision.
Here are 5 Tips to increase employee engagement:
- Give employees a vision and a voice –
- Provide employees with a purpose-driven mission, vision, and goals. Managers should communicate with employees regarding how their department and their role fits into the larger picture to achieve the corporate goals. Build clarity, transparency, and alignment in the organization.
- Then, give them a voice. Involve employees in making suggestions to improve workplace culture and /or business processes to help achieve those goals. The people closest to the work will likely have the best ideas regarding ways to make improvements. Soliciting employee input will yield two beneficial results: 1.) increased employee engagement due to “feeling heard”, and 2.) actual improvements to the workplace and processes as a result of their suggestions.
- Provide regular feedback, recognition, and appreciation – “Compensation is a right, recognition is a gift.” Thank the person spontaneously by name for their contributions. Be specific in your feedback and recognition. Identify the value that the employee brings to the team and the organization as a whole. Celebrate successes and provide positive feedback on a regular basis for a job well done.
- Develop a succession plan – Foster employee development to help employees understand their path for growth at the company. Determine ways to grow their career while filling key roles as they develop within the company. Provide opportunities for new training, new challenges, and increased responsibility such as taking on a special project or a team leadership role. Take the time to understand your employees’ interests and career aspirations and then work closely with them to develop a plan accordingly. (Note: According to the American Society of Training & Development, organizations that invested the most in training had higher gross margins and income per employee. Now that’s something to think about…)
- Provide meaningful work – One of the most important ways to keep employees engaged is to give them meaningful work! So what’s in the way of your employees maximizing their potential? Do they have what they need to succeed?Remember, there is a big difference between value-added, meaningful work and all other kinds of work. Determine ways to increase the percentage of time your people spend doing value-added work versus busy work or rework. In turn, this will lead to increased motivation, performance, and productivity. And, for more on “meaningful work,” if you’re marketing and selling to Corporate Training & HR, take a long hard look at tip #5.
- Give reps what they NEED to SUCCEED – 67% of employees believe their company’s broken processes prevent them from maximizing their potential (Nintex). If you are in charge of a team marketing and selling to corporate training & HR, find ways to streamline the work processes and give them what they need to succeed.
- First, determine which tasks are truly value-added, and which are “busy work” or rework for your sales team.
- Eliminate tasks which should be moved to a sales support person (such as typing proposals, searching for leads, inputting leads into a CRM system, etc.)
- Provide your sales and marketing people with the tools they need to perform MORE value-added work – In the case of a sales rep, this would be the SELLING.
- Invest in a high-quality list of corporate training & HR decision makers so your reps can stop wasting their time digging for leads! (They don’t like digging for leads any more than you like paying them high wages to do so! Sales Representatives should be selling, not hunting and pecking around for leads.)
- Free up their time so your sales reps spend more time interacting with customers.
- The result?
- Increased selling time and more motivated employees
- Decreased absenteeism and attrition
- A highly engaged team
- Increased sales revenue!
Let’s remove one key barrier to selling right away: STOP making your sales and marketing people dig around for their own leads. Instead, give them an accurate database of Training & HR decision-makers (including phone, email, mailing address, etc.) TO CALL AND EMAIL TODAY.
Mentor Tech Group hand-builds and maintains a top quality database of more than 40,000 decision-maker contacts in Corporate Training, e-Learning, and HR. If you have never used Mentor Tech Group, you will be amazed at the accuracy of our database and the quality of our service. We guarantee it.
Learn more about how our customers describe working with the MTG database, using phrases like:
- Well worth the investment; a valuable time saver
- A perfectly targeted list; Reliable and Highly accurate
- Exceeded all expectations.
Remember, MTG’s database consists of decision-maker “market intelligence” information, which is much different from what a list broker will offer you. Our contact database is unlike any other list you may have purchased in the past. We’re here to help you achieve the success you want, with the list of Corporate Training & HR decision-makers you NEED.
Just watch our customer video testimonials, then give us a call at (651) 457-8600, Ext 3!
We wish you much success…until next time.
